In a recent article in The New York Times, Congressional Democrats are quoted for their unease with President Obama’s seemingly open-ended commitment in Afghanistan. The most out-spoken among those in the article was Alan Grayson, a freshman from Florida. Regarding Democrats who are expressing outright opposition to continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Grayson said:

“There is no need in the 21st century to do this, to make us safe,” Representative Alan Grayson, a freshman Democrat from Florida, said of the continuing American-led wars. “This is a 19th-century strategy being played out at great expense in both money and blood in the 21st century, in the wrong time at the wrong place.”

What an unusual concept it must be for Republican’s to grasp, that just because you share the same political affiliation with the president, it does not mean that you march blindly in his or her footsteps. Grayson was the subject of a 2007 article in Vanity Fair where David Rose wrote about an ambitious lawyer named Alan Grayson, who at the time was suing KBR and other defense contractors in Iraq for alleged fraud on behalf of whistleblowers and American taxpayers. Grayson ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2006 He ran again in 2008, and this time was elected to represent Florida’s 8th district.